Category Archives: lying

The recent Iowa trip has been more or less a metaphor for my life as a whole. I don’t mean to be funny but… wait just a minute! Yes I do. This is corn-shucking humor blog, after all! But the metaphor is still there. I was born in Iowa.

Dawn broke over the farm yesterday where Uncle Harry used to live with his wife, Aunt Jean, and their three kids, Karen, Bob, and Tom. Bob was in my class at school. We got into a fight once over who should be Robin Hood when we were playing with all the cousins in the old brooder house on Grandpa Aldrich’s farm, the farm where mom and dad now live. It was a fight that got so intense that we were throwing broke flower-pot shards at each other in anger. Bob’s hand got cut so badly that he had to go to Belmond and get stitches. Dang, was I in trouble after that. Bob’s version, the shard I threw hit him right in the hand, directly between his thumb and pointer finger and cut him. My version, he cut himself as he threw a pot shard at me, and it cut him leaving his hand. Everyone believed Bob, of course. I’m the nutty kid that always told the stories that gave the girls nightmares. And those stories were never true… mostly. So they couldn’t believe my version.

Mom and my sister Nancy designed and executed the painted barn quilt on the work shed that used to be the chicken house.

Bucolic farm scene to represent my Iowegian past.

But life, like days and car trips, moves on. We had to pack up the little Ford Escort that brought me home and take off once more for Texas. I was a little bit worried about the dog. She didn’t poop as much in Iowa as she normally does in Texas. Well, we figured that out on the way back. She pooped a lot of funny colors at every rest-stop dog park on the way back to Texas because of all the people food she had eaten. She got fed better in Iowa apparently. And it was stuff like stolen Doritos and other stuff that is so not-good-for-her.

But going back to Texas with two kids and a dog is a lot like me after college, moving to Texas via Trailways bus in order to become a teacher. I got a job in Cotulla, Texas, the place where LBJ taught way back when he was a young Texan and still working at being good at telling the REALLY BIG LIES. I think I mentioned this before, but all the kids in the painting above were real kids I taught in my first year teaching (except for the kid sleeping.,, nobody did anything but hop around and yell at me my first year as a teacher… including the principal). Oh, and the window is imaginary. I taught for three years in a windowless concrete box with only buzzing fluorescent lights to keep the monsters from killing and eating me… or each other. Within a decade of that first class, two of the boys had been to prison, three were already dead, and one became a star lineman for the Texas A&M football team.

And over time I got closer and closer to my goal. My skills became bigger and better as a teacher. I grew in wisdom and power. Honestly, the grass in the picture was closer to the camera than I was, so I am looming in the sky above the photographer, not tiny and smaller than the grass. So maybe I better claim the picture was taken by fairies. Yeah, that’s it. Down there in the grass. Iowegian fairies got a hold of my camera and took the picture. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. (See. I never really learned to get away with the REALLY BIG LIES. A teacher, as a storyteller, has to also be a truth-teller.)

So we returned to Texas, and that is probably where the sunset of my life will take place. I am retired from teaching now. I am blogging and telling lies instead… well, writing fiction. I should have another book published soon. And it has fairies in it. So maybe there is still time to pull off the REALLY BIG LIES.

The malignant mango we have inexplicably put in charge of our country is calling everything that hits the headlines “Fake News”. But that is basically because if he says to his true believers that anything bad that is reported is not true, they will believe it and continue to support him even though it goes against everything they have stated they believe for the course of their entire lifetime. So our orangutan in chief is reporting that news is “Fake News”, and that report is “Fake News”. So the “Fake News” about “Fake News” is provably FAKE. Damn!

Perhaps the Republican Overlords who now rule the Evil Empire get away with warping reality like that because we, as the news-consuming public are simply not paying attention.

Now, I can’t claim that I am hard to fool. I believe, after all, that aliens have been visiting the Earth for millennia. I believe that Area 51 is where the U.S. back-engineered the crashed UFOs from Roswell, and I believe that Bob Lazar is a real human being. I am almost like a Trumpkin in my devotion to such commonly debunked conspiracy theories.

But I can research my way out of cardboard boxes and confusing bubbles of misinformation. I recently caught a whiff of alien uproar from a former student’s Facebook post about an article on DiscloseTV.com. (click here for article) It’s the kind of thing I want to know about if it turns out to be true. I read there that a NASA spokeswoman, Trish Chamberson, had publicly admitted that the US government is in contact with at least four different alien species, and has been since the Truman administration. This would, of course, confirm what I have feverishly believed for over half of my sixty year lifetime.

But I made the mistake of Googling Trish Chamberson. Soap bubbles of Fake News pop easily.

I think we should also be considering the question, “Is there intelligent life living here?”

Oopsie!

It turns out the conspiracy website had taken information from a site clearly marked satire and published it as fact.

Waterford Whispers is largely recognized as an Irish counterpart to The Onion among its primary reader base (in the UK and Ireland). However, previous items from the site have been confused for real news, including reports that the Pope commissioned J.K. Rowling to rewrite the Bible, the Muppet known as “Animal” had died, and that the Vatican decreed Jesus was not returning. Disclose.tv has passed on a decent share of fake news items, including claims a baby in the Philippines was born with Stigmata and Edward Snowden had been “reported dead by his girlfriend.”-quoted from Snopes.com

Yes, proving you are being stupid for believing in “Fake News” is really that easy.

But it is also true that the pile of horse poop given to us to sift through on a daily basis by the rusty orange mouth-poop factory that dominates the nightly news is incredibly vast and mostly unsiftable. So his tactic of saying real news is “Fake News” which is in itself “Fake News” is almost guaranteed to work. It is FAKE after all. Dang!

(And on a side note, the best proof we have that aliens really are visiting the Earth is now sitting in the White House. Surely you didn’t think anything that orange and awful and full of horse poop was actually human in origin, did you?)

He won by hanging nicknames like millstones around the necks of his opponents.

He called this fellow “Lyin’ Ted”.

And he berated her as “Crooked Hillary”

Insults, nicknames, and politics seem to work better together than anything else when you are trying to win over the fat, lazy white folks with too much money who gather at the Cracker Barrel in Lewisville, Texas to decide who will be President of the U. S. After all, they are the only ones whose voice still counts in politics. Voter I.D. laws, gerrymandering of voting districts, and vilification of Muslims has pretty much seen to that.

But I have always felt that insulting your opponent in a debate was not only uncivil, but actually cheating. I would much prefer to see ideas and policies and political positions be ridiculed. Still, that is not the way the world works now that the semi-stupid people have taken control. Vicious and personal is the preferred way of the modern day.

It was certainly awkward, stupid, and bad the way a certain Texas Grandpa Munster look-alike exploited his own children during his GOP nomination campaign. But that paled in comparison with how the Great Orange Face accused his father of killing J.F.K. and called his wife ugly in comparison to the plastic Barbie doll that Pumpkinhead currently keeps on leash number three for himself. Grampy Munster was right, when he said family should be off limits.

If you must vilify the un-TrusTED One, and we certainly must, it should be for the selfish, stupid policies and agendas that he would enact if he wins the golden ticket.

And how do we know what he would do if the “Ultimate Power of Castle Grayskull” actually became his? Well, he did spend a lot of time telling us what he would do. His message was not all Green Eggs and Ham. Though there was a lot of leftover ham even after the Dr. Seuss Filibuster.

So what is the proper way to talk about the Orangutan King we made the mistake of electing?

He has gone to considerable effort to place doubt in everyone’s mind about the truth in every reported story from the media.

Although, he seems to really like Fox News.

He has hammered it into the brains of his true believers that anything CNN says about the Russian hacking scandal is absolutely “WRONG!” Though I am inclined to believe that everything that comes out of his mouth truly means that the opposite of what he says is true.

And I think we all have to work a little harder to deny him control over what is defined as “True” and what he can be allowed to call “Fake.”

So, even though I realize I have a certain talent for insulting others myself, and have used it generously here, I do not think insults are the right way to go. You should talk about the ideas and the prejudices, and how those things lead to evil befalling us. Insults are a waste of time. But did you notice? While composing this piece, the cartoonists whose work I am sharing with you may have labeled them with names, I never once in my own writing named any of the ones I was insulting by name.

I suppose it is ironic that on Thanksgiving Day I am posting about lies. After all, I really am thankful for the lies in some very specific ways. Paul Simon’s song is the reason for the odd title and underscores the feeling I am trying to explain;

Yes, I am grateful that most of what the orange-faced man has said on the campaign trail has turned out to be lies. I thank the Lord that the great ball of cantaloupe-colored mouth-flatulence has indicated he might not actually pull out of the Paris Accords on climate change. That little item being a lie may save our entire planet and all life on Earth. I thank the Lord that the orangutan president has had second thoughts about prosecuting Hillary Clinton for crimes she didn’t actually commit.

I thank the Lord that the goal of repealing Obamacare is just a lie. My diabetes is grateful too. King Donald, seen in the photo above pitching snake oil and bananas to an innocent member of the American public, has strongly indicated he will keep all the good parts of Obamacare… and will basically just change the name to Trumpacare. Of course, he will be preserving high premiums and profits for the insurance industry as well.

I have a strong suspicion the wall is just a lie as well. In fact, the nature of President Cinnamon Hitler is such that if he is trying to keep alien secrets about Area 51 with the same talent for keeping secrets he displayed on the bus video and in his formation of a cabinet in his administrative transition, we may soon know the complete truth about Roswell.

But I’m sure you realize by now that all this is in the manner of lies and jests. In reality I am Paul Simon’s boxer;

Yes, I am beaten down by life. I have been lied to. I have been tricked. And if I only could, I would give that monkey such a punch! But we are all the boxer, all scarred. And we all together vastly outnumber the monkey’s minions. I may not live to see it, but it will always be a possibility, for as long as the fighter still remains. And I am thankful for that.

Mark Twain had a lot to say about lying. Like in this quote from Following the Equator ; Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar; “There are 869 different forms of lying, but only one of them has been squarely forbidden. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.”

Now, I would have to agree with the Biblical admonition against lying to get the people you dislike thrown into prison or beheaded. I am especially concerned with some of the false witness pooping out of the mouths of some presidential candidates that would like us to believe their anti-science, anti-climate change, and anti-immigration lies would make good laws for our country. If they go with Donald Trump’s idea of taking away birthright citizenship from the children of immigrants, then my three children will lose their citizenship and could be deported from the only country they have lived in. After all, after twenty years of marriage and applications and legal fees and enough frustration to make her give up on the whole idea, my wife is still not an American citizen. She is from the Philippines, and Filipinos are one of the main groups that politicians site as reason for taking automatic citizenship away from foreign-born marriage mates back in the 1980’s. And if we truly believe that climate change is a hoax and disproven by having Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe bring a snowball into the senate chamber, I believe we are all going to fry in Venus-like atmospheric conditions (Venus is 400 degrees Centigrade on the surface due to rampant greenhouse gasses like those emitted by the factories of Senator Inhofe’s primary campaign donors). Some lies have fatal consequences, (and also, apparently, got Senator Inhofe the chairmanship of the Senate Science Committee).

But not all lies are bad lies. Twain also says; “In all lies there is wheat among the chaff…”
– A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

And; “The lie, as a virtue, a principle, is eternal; the lie, as a recreation, a solace, a refuge in time of need, the fourth Grace, the tenth Muse, man’s best and surest friend is immortal.”
– “On the Decay of the Art of Lying”

So I have actually started to think that the lies not forbidden by the Bible because of their fatal consequences are actually all good things, and not bad. Yesterday in a post about talking to stupid people, I suggested that you should tell them lies about how you care about them and want the best for them, and you should lie about it so hard that you believe in the lies yourself. After all, story-tellers like me tell nothing but lies. My made-up stories are based on real events and people, and reveal real perceived truths about life, but they are basically nothing but lies. This essay is a lie. I was brought up in Iowa to be truthful and always tell the truth… and that was repeatedly reinforced by religious training from every church I ever attended. And yet, the more I tried to tell the truth, the more I realized that I could never say anything that was not a lie. Think about it, what is there in all the factual things that you know that you can actually prove is true? “I think, therefore I am,” (a quote from Rene Descartes) is the only thing anyone has ever said that I can prove by my own perceptions. Every scientific theory is constantly reviewed for lies and untruth and inaccuracy so that they can be revised for something better that is also not ultimately provably true in every detail. It is entirely possible that everything else truly is a lie, and then the whole universe, science, physics, logic, and everything is basically untrue.

So, what do I do? Anything I say is a lie. Some of the lies are hurtful, even deadly. So I have to be careful about those lies. I should fight against those lies. But the lies that make our existence in life meaningful and full of hope and mystery… I have to let those lies live, and even learn to do them artfully.

“One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.”
– Pudd’nhead Wilson by Mark Twain.